Are you getting paid enough? LinkedIn launches salary comparison tool

Employees eyeing a pay raise or new job now have another tool to figure out what they can do to earn a higher salary.

Taking on Glassdoor, PayScale, Comparably and Monster, LinkedIn on Wednesday rolled out a tool that allows users to find the median base salary and total compensation of a profession by searching by job title and location.

LinkedIn Salary also shows which companies are paying higher salaries, the education level associated with a certain pay scale, top paying locations and available job listings. Users can filter data based on industry and years of experience.

A screenshot of LinkedIn Salary. Provided by LinkedIn.

“What we’re really excited about is providing actionable decisions that members can make to increase their pay and career as a whole,” said Ryan Sandler, a product manager on LinkedIn’s Careers Team. “What should I get paid now, but what should I be paid in the future?”

To fully access the free tool, some users are asked to provide their own salary information. LinkedIn is using salary data that its members voluntarily submit to power the new product. Premium subscribers do not need to contribute information about their pay to use LinkedIn Salary.

More than 1 million LinkedIn members have provided their salary data, Sandler said. But with privacy on the mind of digital consumers, he stressed that the submissions are aggregated and anonymized.

“We’ve gone through a lot of means to (ensure) that privacy is maintained and that not even employees at LinkedIn could identify who submitted what,” he said.

The business-oriented social media company also has been using machine learning to weed out any salary data that is likely falsely submitted, looking at labor statistics and salaries from job postings. About 10 percent of submissions were thrown out, Sandler said.

Other sites, such as Glassdoor and PayScale, also have salary tools, but Sandler noted that LinkedIn members already post their education and work history on their profile, making it easier to verify the accuracy of the data.

“There’s a number of websites that have been providing compensation information for quite some time. What we’ve heard from our members is that a lot of the data out there isn’t very reliable,” he said.

The new salary tool is available to LinkedIn members on desktop and mobile in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. The Mountain View-based tech firm, which is being purchased by Microsoft, plans to release LinkedIn Salary globally in 2017.

LinkedIn has more than 467 million members in more than 200 countries and territories.